Not withstanding the sound of fighter jets constantly roaring skywards to patrol the airspace for Russian and Chinese interlopers in that delicate part of the globe, the reality in the pool could hardly be more divorced from the uplifting marketing slogan.

There was a feeling at the Rio Olympic Games that the athlete revolt against doping had reached a tipping point. Swimmers Mack Horton and Lilly King, with their brash public rebukes of China's Sun Yang and Russia's Yulia Efimova, became the faces of a frustrated competing cohort that felt they must act when their governing body, in that case FINA, would not.

Three years later, that hostility has not only refused to subside but reached new levels of animosity at the World Championships. Sun, once again, has become a lightning rod of resentment but the reasons are more complex than a simple rebuke to his past doping infringement - he was banned for three months in 2014 - and the current one in which he finds himself immersed.

Sun is competing in South Korea under the cloud of a World Anti-Doping Agency appeal against a FINA doping ruling that cleared him of destroying - with a hammer - a blood sample that was to be tested.

Much of the anger is directed towards FINA, a governing body which, as they say in the Australian football codes, has well and truly "lost the dressing room". Many of the sport's highest-profile athletes consider it to be inept, bloated by muddling bureaucrats, incapable of dealing with serious issues like doping. None of FINA's leaders have been available for interview in Gwangju as the event catches fire around them. In waiting for it all to just go away, they have shown again they simply cannot read the room.

WADA's appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport will he heard in September and his fate will be decided after lawyers pour over technical legal details. Ultimately, CAS will determine whether the saga ends for good in September or rolls into Tokyo next year.